“Why are we spending money and effort on space exploration when we’re facing so many issues here at home? We shouldn’t go into space until we solve all our problems...

Here On Earth

Okay. Let’s solve our down-to-earth problems...

Let’s create jobs

The New Private Space Race

SpaceX made history when its Dragon spacecraft became the first privately-developed vehicle in history to attach to the International Space Station. Previously only governments had achieved this feat. And SpaceX is by no means the only up-and-coming space company.

Shops Large & Small

Every mission and support operation is built with the labor of large aerospace corporations, along with many not-so-large businesses. Kegman Inc. is a small outfit that monitors and analyzes the wind impact during launch preparations. They helped send the Curiosity rover to Mars.

No Tang. But Lots of Tech.

Way beyond direct jobs in the space program are the countless technologies that result from it, which companies then put to work, which puts people to work. NASA didn’t invent Tang or Teflon. But there’s a long list of real spinoffs in use all around the world every day. One company turned insulation designed for the space shuttle into everything from insoles to home insulation. Pretty boring—except to the people whose jobs it provided and the people who use it.

Let’s understand & care for the environment

Earth from Above

Environmentalism and space exploration have been inseparable ever since the first images of a small, blue globe floating in the blackness changed the human perspective on the world. Now, space-collected data is at the core of broad swaths of our knowledge of how the Earth works. Just one example is the Landsat Program, a series of Earth-observing missions that since 1972 have collected information about Earth from space, focusing on water, forests and other resources.

The Color of Home

Europe’s Envisat is the largest Earth Observation spacecraft ever built. It carries ten sophisticated optical and radar instruments to provide continuous observation and monitoring of the Earth’s land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps. One of its missions is monitor sea color in oceans and coastal areas. This knowledge can be converted into a measurement of chlorophyll concentration and other key data for land and atmospheric monitoring.

Saving Lives with Satellites

After the great earthquake last year, Japan undertook a nationwide effort to better understand, prevent and cope with natural disasters. One major part of those plans calls for several new space missions.

From the Surface of the Sun to the Human Brain

One mission studies solar flares, powerful eruptions on the sun that can disrupt communications on Earth. Understanding them brings obvious benefits. The bonus? Technology developed for the solar instruments turns out to be great for better medical brain scans. This is the kind of story that is echoed again and again.

Let’s inspire the next generation of problem solvers

The Most Astounding Thing

It’s much harder to quantify ‘inspiration.’ But harder still is to overstate how many engineers and scientists—the ones tackling the most vexing human needs—had their interest sparked and their education accelerated by the Space Race. What will the next generation have?

“More of Our Strengths, Fewer of Our Weaknesses”

On Fire Since the Word Go

“The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go.” —Annie Dillard

There are no special effects in the following video. It’s actual time lapse photography from the space station.

“Fine, but there’s just no money...”

Really?

A Very Thin Slice of Pie

Ask many Americans what percentage of the federal budget is taken up by NASA, and they’ll answer with something in the double digits. The actual amount? Less than one percent. Less than one half of one percent, in fact. In this famous interactive infographic by The New York Times, the space budget is represented by one of the tiny sub-squares in one of the small squares in the lower right, far too small to be labeled at this scale. Should it be a big square? Probably not. But, with a little planning, clearly science is within the fiscal reach of great nations.

It Does Make a Great Ride

Making the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies cost an estimated $450 million.

(It’s true that this not an apples-to-apples comparison, since one is a private venture and the other is taxpayer-funded, etc. But when you consider the mountain we spend on entertainment, sports, war and so on, it’s hard to say there’s no money in society for exploration when the payoffs are so great.)